


pause/play

by cordialcount



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Gloves & Ties, M/M, Post-Episode: s01e08, Reassurances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-09-03 00:58:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8690377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/pseuds/cordialcount
Summary: The mechanical noises blanket the room in a truer quiet than silence. "Yes," he breathes into it, more feeling than sound.(Yuuri, holding them together.)





	

At check-in Yuuri hadn't known if Victor contrived their stay in a single room, or if he was merely and dazzlingly bad at logistics, like he was at knocking before entering, packing his boxers, being candid without turning someone red or teary-eyed, or deterring Yuuri's affection despite these deficiencies. Now he does: their shared bed was given by fortune alone. Victor's name opens a seat on overbooked flights, but Yakov has to wield it. After Victor's first minute on the phone Yakov yanks it away, flourishing the universal sign for _Go wait around decoratively somewhere you can't screw this up_.

The reporters close in. Victor, resigned, puts on a grin for the cameras. Yuuri scans the gauntlet for distractions and desperately waves at the bobbing cat ears. In the greatest act of kindness Yurio's ever shown Yuuri, he covers their retreat by barreling through their entourage, yelling something so extravagantly rude the microphones zero in on him like sharks. 

They've taxied back to the hotel before Yakov texts them both ("so Vitya can't show up tomorrow and claim he missed the flight") a flight number, a pickup time, and a string of Cyrillic that makes Victor smile like he's in pain. Victor does not translate. Yuuri considers googling the words later, then feels ashamed of intruding on a conversation with Victor's next-of-kin. It's—not what he's for. It's other intimacies he's meant to take and give.

Yuuri realizes they are still linked glove in sweating hand. "Go shower," Victor says, having looked down at the same time; but it is a few seconds before he actually lets go, peeling off Yuuri's wet jacket to pet in his arms.

 

 

When Yuuri gets out of the bathroom it's half past five, an hour before he'll let Victor go. Victor is playing alchemist at the minibar.

Even sifted through rainclouds, enough light streams through the gap in the curtains to blaze the drinks to amber, the glasses to prisms. They leave tiny flecks of red and gold in the clean canvas of Victor's hair. With his suit still crisp over his body as he pours, the casual scrutiny he usually applies to other skaters tightening the planes of his face, he looks devastating. He doesn't look like the Victor Yuuri had to squirm free of just a few hours ago, trying to hug Yuuri and pump his fists at once: it's magazine beauty. It stings. Victor should no longer be an image Yuuri has to scrapbook.

"Victor," Yuuri says. His slippers scuffle against the carpet. Victor cracks open another bottle without turning, releasing the smoky aroma of whisky.

Yuuri's become used to Victor's attention. If, he thinks, with gut-swooping awe, one could ever become used to the attention of Victor Nikiforov! Yet he's been so securely lifted by its presence, these weeks since the Cup, that it jolts him now to witness something else at the front of Victor's mind. A frog might choke when put back in its river of birth. Yuuri came no closer to Victor in his first twenty-two years than stilted waving, and yet.

"That's more than this room costs in alcohol," he says. His hand closes on Victor's shoulder.

It digs in, he sees, more than he intended. He begrudges Victor nothing at a time like this, and Victor has always been humiliatingly graceful about paying his tabs before Yuuri can even see them; it's only that the sight reminds him Victor lives both with entitlements the son of a decaying-town innkeeper will never find easy, and with—for Victor—premature grief that maps so easily onto Yuuri's own. He loves this man. He's not sure what to do for him. Were Yuuri comforting himself, he'd want gruff reassurance, then quiet succor; even by probability he doubts that's how Victor works.

Well. Victor had tossed off something in his own foolheaded—albeit compensatingly sincere—attempt to calm Yuuri in Beijing. Victor had meant it as distraction, which had not been what Yuuri then needed, but that's probably what Victor could now use. 

Victor swears by some sleek hair product that makes his hair wriggle through Yuuri's fingers, but he swivels the chair when he feels Yuuri at his scalp. The field is open. Yuuri bends in, licks at the bow of Victor's lips.

For a moment Victor kisses back on autopilot, flashy tricks of the tongue, and then he claws out of the chair and meets Yuuri with as little polish as a virgin, a wet melee between their mouths. Victor tastes faintly sweet, and surprisingly sober. Even so, neither of them recalls how to breathe around the other's nose. Yuuri has to arch into a layback to accommodate Victor's standing height. His fatigued leg topples him onto the bed. Victor, who by now recognizes when Yuuri will fall earlier than he does, catches himself on his elbows. 

He says, "Oh, Yuuri."

His bangs curtain off his eyes. Yuuri reaches up to brush them away, and is interrupted by Victor's hand carrying out the same intention, soft leather grazing his fingers before he lets them fall. "Did that... help?"

"Of course," Victor says. This sounds real, layered with imperious exasperation. _I suggested it. Of course it works._ "Just give me a minute."

Yuuri lies down on the bed to wait through the clinks of glass. He's so tired he thinks sleep may submerge him before Victor comes to fight it off, but then he feels one heel cradled in a gloved hand. Far beyond his blood in his ears the rain still patters the balconies and parapets, and the heater whistles, and the refrigerator hums after it in melody. The mechanical noises blanket the room in a truer quiet than silence. "Yes," he breathes into it, more feeling than sound.

Victor's exhale touches just under the arch. His lips just under Yuuri's ankle, where his boot leaves bruises closest to the skin. It's a small pain, gentler than the soaring of Yuuri's heart against his ribs. The kiss repeats on the other foot. Yuuri is a creature of habit and muscle memory—this has always limited his choreography, he cannot skate an emotion he's not achingly familiar with—and can perform his jumps blind, but this is no standard footwork. He has to consider where Victor must be kneeling, and how to avoid kicking him in the nose, before he gently hooks his foot around and successfully lays his cold toes against Victor's nape, warm skin and soft hairs. Lower, the hard nodes of Victor's spine, salient even beneath his suit. Victor follows his movements, placing a constellation of kisses up his calves.

There's a lull where his towel ends. "Tell me what to do," Victor says, into the space between his knees.

Scream or beg, he cannot _say_ it. Unthinkingly he reaches out. He runs his hand over that weird strip of cloth Western hotels add to the bedspread, a rumpled lapel, and an open button. If he scoots up, he can skim over Victor's wool waistcoat. A little further and he can yank on Victor's tie, latching his fingers into the knot to haul Victor fully onto the bed.

It was one thing to do this rinkside: adrenaline, performance focus, and the blanking influence of 360-degree exposure rendered the act paradoxically private. Twice is an admission, or a forming habit. This time he can see the silk lacing into Victor's neck, and feel Victor shudder against his fingertips. Victor is the one whose Windsor was shoved into his windpipe, and yet something in Yuuri's chest is writhing and expanding, to cut off his air. He doesn't breathe until Victor does, in a rush like a fall. 

Victor, gazing at Yuuri through his eyelashes, has the gratified-but-demanding-more look of a petted cat. Yuuri swallows. His thumb is still on Victor's clavicle, the rest of his fingers clutched around the tie. He pulls up until Victor gasps, muffles it in a kiss to Yuuri's cheek. "Let me," Victor gets out. For a minute he just breathes against Yuuri's face.

"Sorry," Yuuri whispers. "I wanted—I mean, I thought you'd want—" what? To be too wrung out to brood? To be carried through? To be walked with, into the valley? To exhaust his oxygen along the way?

"Let me finish," Victor says. It's arch, but not cross. 

His legs press against Yuuri's as he props himself onto an elbow. Yuuri abruptly feels how hard Victor is, and realizes his own body is responding the same way. He lets the towel open. Victor doesn't bother to tease much; his expensive clothes are fastballed to the floor. Removing the tie reveals a broad reddening stripe around his neck. There too are his full collarbone, and his arms and chest, his flat belly with its smattering of hair missed by a razor, his thighs. His smile, tipped to one corner.

Victor's pulling off his right glove with his teeth. His left will be next. Yuuri, without thinking, stops him by lacing his own fingers into the half-gloved ones. "Touch me," he says, tongue feeling huge in his mouth.

Victor grinds up against him, skin to skin, before he finally fits his hand between them and strokes. There's the sensation of smooth leather against the tender skin of his inner thigh, and then his cock: with, because it's Victor and he always knows, a twist under the head that makes Yuuri cry out. Yuuri rolls them both over for leverage, and blindly pins Victor's shoulder with his free hand.

" _Victor_ ", he says. This is all he can. There's a fine tremble in his fingers, shared with Victor through their still-joined hands on the pillow; there's a gathering heat like a pool. There's an embarrassing noise coming out of his throat. Victor runs his thumb against his cock again, a precise and exquisite sequence, and Yuuri shivers and stops all thought.

A few minutes later, once Yuuri has done his enthusiastic best for Victor and carefully saved the memory of Victor moaning with his tie around his wrists, they finally make it under the sheets. "Do you know they don't change these," Victor says, laughing as he waves at the bedspread. 

The alarm is about to go off. Victor is beautiful, even fending off a pillow—not the austere beauty of a blade or a bouquet, but rawly and flushedly, like an infection. The smell of them both still hangs in the air; Yuuri feels _them_ as he thinks it, down to his marrow. 

 

 

Victor orders Yuuri not to ride along. "You need to go to dinner with Yakov's team," he's saying, "you'll get good advice from someone who isn't as biased as I am—" but Yuuri's looking at his wide eyes, this poorly concealed weakness. 

For a moment he's in Sochi again, his heart seized, his thoughts entirely independent of what his coach encourages, what his body craves; but this time Yuuri steps toward instead of away. "I need to," he says. 

The unsaid _You do too_ doesn't go unheard. Victor's hand stops pulling the door, lifting with his shoulder in a showy beckoning-in. 

Cordoned off by rain, the streets and buildings outside feel forever away. A smudgy plastic sheet then partitions the cab back from front. In the diminished space the sillage of Victor's reapplied cologne is clear even when they sit at a safe distance, like salarymen. When the car veers horizontally into the traffic like a drunk crab, landing Victor's head on Yuuri's shoulder, it becomes unbearable—he'd been the one to push Victor into returning to Hasetsu, armed and rendered implacable by old guilt; but desire is more unforgiving a weapon, with Victor's scent all around him to sharpen it. 

"Makkachin will be fine," Yuuri says. He presses his palms together. A profession of truth, or a prayer: either will do. "You'll be fine, and so will I."

At the airport Yuuri shoves his hands in his pockets and finds the gloves. "I would launder and ship them, but it'll be cold when you land," he starts. Victor shakes his head, truncating his blush.

"A piece of you to wear wherever I go," Victor says. "I'm so touched!"

Yuuri shudders down to his toes. Even Victor can't keep all color off his cheeks. He drags them around a corner and slides down behind a shield of luggage carts. Yuuri's hands are occupied. Victor's find his jaw with formidable accuracy, and then the only thing Yuuri can do is kiss him. A cool tangle of damp hair, a hot yielding: Yuuri feels his whole face taking on the warmth of Victor's mouth. Gradually he gets the gloves into Victor's waistband, and circles one of Victor's wrists to tug on, a _Please, another time_ he doesn't have the breath to voice. 

Victor lets him pull their linked hands all the way up against the wall before he acquiesces. His lips, parting, are swollen from Yuuri's teeth, which Yuuri hadn't even realized were involved. "Ah, Yuuri," Victor murmurs, "what lovely souvenirs you're leaving me to think about on the plane." One hand slips up to his throat.

"I don't want you," Yuuri says, "to have to think about anything else."

"Give me your hand," Victor says. When Yuuri complies, he settles Yuuri's fingertips over his eyelids, like a blessing. "You know, darling, these will always be for you."


End file.
